The role of private funding and management in U.S. urban public services has expanded through the auspices of private nonprofit organizations in formal relationships with government and aided by large gifts from wealthy donors with visions for their cities, leading scholars to raise concerns about potential harm to democratic governance and displacement of public investment. Where do these private efforts fit into current policy initiatives to improve equity in schools and parks? Employing Susan Fainstein’s Just City framework, this article analyzes cases in which policy actors sought constraints on private dollars in an attempt to institutionalize equity into public private partnership (PPP) regimes. The Portland, Oregon, school board required that school foundations share funds with a districtwide foundation for reallocation. In New York City, unsuccessful state legislation proposed reallocating private funds but executive action redirected public city funds, and largely nonmonetary private resources. These cases can inform policymakers striving for just cities.
While research on business improvement districts (BIDs) has considered the constraints BIDs can place on the negotiation of public space and citizenship, little work has focused on the process of establishing neighborhood BIDs (NBIDs), and few scholars have examined perceptions of public space held by actual neighborhood constituents. This article analyzes a participatory mapping project and messages on a neighborhood e-mail list to compare the visions of place expressed by disempowered community members and by an NBID proposal. Our analysis illuminates how local power relations and inequalities can become inscribed in urban planning projects like NBIDs.
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